glgormanThere is a whole bunch of stuff that I want to do, like talk about the "phone book trick from the movie Rain Man", and how there is an urban legend that it was actually done by the magician and memory expert Harry Lorayne, who was also one of the authors of a best-selling book entitled "The Memory Book." Even if Lorayne didn't actually memorize the entire Manhattan telephone directory, it was said that he did memorize quite a few pages, just to prove that it could be done.
This is something that I want to talk about in a different context, i.e., with respect to Lottery systems, whether they work or not. Yet they will have utility, I think, in finding interesting and novel ways to approach the problem of designing an LLM from scratch.
Since this is going to take a while to explain, perhaps it would be best to start with an excerpt directly from the book, or just simply borrow a description for one popular system for memorizing numbers from the Wikipedia article on the so-called "Mnemonic Major System."
So here is "The system", shamelessly borrowed from Wikipedia:
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| 0 | /s/, /z/ | s, soft c, z | Zero begins with z (and /z/). Upper case S and Z, as well as lower case s and z, have zero vertical strokes each, as with the numeral 0. The alveolar fricatives /s/ and /z/ form a voiceless and voiced pair. |
| 1 | /t/, /d/, /θ/, /ð/ | t, d, th (as in thing and this) | Upper case T and D, as well as lower case t and d have one vertical stroke each, as with the numeral 1. The alveolar stops /t/ and /d/ form a voiceless and voiced pair, as do the similar-sounding dental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/, though some variant systems may omit the latter pair. |
| 2 | /n/ | n | Upper case N and lower case n each have two vertical strokes and two points on the baseline. |
| 3 | /m/ | m | Lower case m has three vertical strokes. Both upper case M and lower case m each have three points on the baseline and look like the numeral 3 on its side. |
| 4 | /r/ | r | Four ends with r (and /r/ in rhotic accents). |
| 5 | /l/ | l | L is the Roman numeral for 50. Among the five digits of one's left hand, the thumb and index fingers also form an L. |
| 6 | /tʃ/, /dʒ/, /ʒ/, /ʃ/ | ch (as in cheese), j, soft g, sh | Upper case G looks like the numeral 6 and lower case g looks like the numeral 6 rotated 180°. Lower case script j tends to have a lower loop, like the numeral 6. In some serif fonts, upper case CH, SH and ZH each have six serifs. CHurch has six letters. The postalveolar affricates /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ form a voiceless and voiced pair, as do the similar-sounding postalveolar fricatives /ʃ/ and /ʒ/. |
| 7 | /k/, /ɡ/ | k, hard c, q, hard g, ch (as in loch), | Both upper case K and lower case k look like two small 7s on their sides. In some fonts, the lower-right part of the upper case G looks like a 7. G is also the 7th letter of the alphabet. The velar stops /k/ and /ɡ/ form a voiceless and voiced pair. |
| 8 | /f/, /v/ | f, ph (as in phone), v | Lower case script f, which tends to have an upper and lower loop, looks like a figure-8. The labiodental fricatives /f/ and /v/ form a voiceless and voiced pair. |
| 9 | /p/, /b/ | p, b | Upper case P and lower case p look like the numeral 9 flipped horizontally. Lower case b looks like the numeral 9 turned 180°. The labial stops /p/ and /b/ form a voiceless and voiced pair. |
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Now what do we do with it? Well when taking a short phrase like "I LOVE A MYSTERY", or "I LIVE OUT MY DREAMS", we can easily see that the first sentence encodes the sequence 5-8-30-14 and the second sequence encodes the pattern 5-8-13-14-30, that is to say, if we have a constraint that what we want to do is to try to find a way to create some kind of "magic cookie" as it were, that somehow encodes a set of numbers that can be played on a Lottery game.
Yet that implies something, of course, and that is a whole "new" kind of "mining", that is to say, "new" for most people. Since the order in which Lottery numbers are drawn usually doesn't matter, for some games, that is, like the Power Ball or the Mega Millions, which creates the situation of perhaps generating "sets of single consonants, as well as pairs and pairs of pairs of consonants" as a starting point, that is to say, for random text generation!
I mean, sure! Why not? It should be easy to see how the word pair "MARTHA COMPONENTS" might be playable on some Lottery game as the set 34-17-39-22-10, if I am reading it right. Now this implies some things, such as the idea of searching the space that contains every possible choice of the type "1-2-3-4-5" though "43-44-45-46-47" and generating all 120 permutations within that space, and then generate every possible set of split points for each combination and permutation, and then of course do a dictionary lookup to see which combinations have word mappings, and then generate potential "magic cookies."
I don't want to tell you how many CPU's I might have melted, or how many hard drives I destroyed trying to generate text in this way. Yet maybe now is a good time to explore some interesting possibilities with a modern GPU.
Warning! This project could melt your PC! You have been warned!
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